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A new Pew Research Center report finds that concern about social media's effect on democracy is spreading across several countries. In the United States, 64% of adults say the impact has been more negative than positive, unchanged from the earlier comparison. Elsewhere, public attitudes have moved closer to that skeptical view.
AllinOneDownloader conceptual illustration of social media and public opinion; it is not a Pew Research Center survey graphic.
The trend is international, but it is not uniform
Pew's latest comparison covers 37 nations. The share describing social media as bad for democracy increased in 16 of the 26 countries with earlier comparable data. The Netherlands now records a negative view among 70% of adults, up from 54% four years earlier.
The US figure is well above the 37-country median of 35%. A median is the middle country-level result, not the percentage of all people worldwide who hold a particular opinion. Keeping that distinction avoids turning a varied set of national surveys into a single global verdict.
Concern is not the same thing as a causal finding
These results measure what people think about social media. They do not isolate how a specific platform changed an election or prove that every kind of online interaction is harmful. The debate overlaps with public demands for restrictions on teen apps, but this research concerns adults' opinions about democracy, not a direct test of children's health.
Trust becomes a publishing issue
For creators and publishers, the findings are a reminder that a familiar platform does not automatically make information credible. A clipped interview or screenshot may travel much further than the explanation around it. Showing where a claim came from, and correcting it visibly when necessary, gives an audience something concrete to assess.
Those habits sit within the broader idea of media literacy: examining the message, its source and the context in which it appears. They matter for ordinary entertainment accounts as well as political pages, especially when a post makes a factual claim beyond its author's expertise.
Regulators are also responding to wider concerns about platform use, as discussed in our coverage of YouTube's response to Australian teen social-media rules. Pew's new figures do not prescribe one policy answer. They show a growing trust problem that platforms and the people publishing on them cannot resolve with reach statistics alone.
